Virtual Creations

Tools

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Software

3D Grid Viewer

As an experiment I wrote a simple Second Life offline 3D grid viewer. It was really just a proof of concept of the
idea of a 3D version of Grid Chart. The viewer was a Windows application written in C++. It used OpenGL for
the 3D rendering. Information about the grid and its sims were stored in a custom human-readable file format.
The topographical data was originally stored in grayscale bitmaps, but I changed that to text files in a later
version. The "texturing" of the sims was done with simple vertex coloring, not texure images, and there was no
shading.

The terrain coloring was calculated dynamically using the surface data gathered for the sims.
There were several different texturing schemes for different regions of the grid, from the
lush ridges of Riki to the white mountains of the snow sims. The rendering could also
be switched between a solid mode, wireframe mode, or a combination of both.